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Well.. what a busy time of the year. As an educator, I am working hard to ensure my students are catered for in the event of school closures. I am also looking at ways I can support parents in this difficult time as they balance working at home and helping their children continue to learn at home.
I hope these simple, effective and cheap paddle pop stick ideas can provide some helpful ways to engage your children at home for as long as possible.
1. Patterns
Using a range of coloured paddle pop sticks. Allow your child/ren to experiment wth different patterns they can make. This could be as simple as green, yellow, green, yellow. Or even, green, green, blue, purple, green, green, blue, purple.
It is important that children develop curiosity and challenge themselves by making their own patterns. Children learn through making mistakes and problem solving.
2. Skip-Counting
Skip-counting is when we count forwards or backwards by a number greater than one. This is a perfect activity that your year 1 to year 6 aged (5-12) children can do!
Using paddle pop sticks and a pen, write the numbers 1-100. If you have more paddle pop sticks feel free to go up to a greater number. However, your children may get bored after 100 haha.
Challenge your children to skip count by the numbers they already know. Reminding them of the pattern (eg, skip-count by 3 is always adding three more).
It might be fun to ask your child what pattern they can see within each of these number patterns. They might even notice some colour patterns too!
Note: you can also use these numbers for addition and subtraction problems. Children can pick one, two, or three paddle pop sticks out of a cup at one time and add or subtract the numbers.
3. Sight Words
Sight words are the words we read or speak most frequently. Examples of these are: me, you, we, can, but, so, and, because, from. This paddle pop activity can help your child develop letter and word recognition. Using the same paddle pop sticks as above, flip them over and write one letter from the alphabet on each end of the stick. Make sure you write the alphabet at least twice. If possible, three times.
For a list of sight words most commonly used click here to take you to the NSW Department of Education's Basic Sight Words list.
You could also use books and magazines from around the house to find sight words to recreate. This activity is perfect for all ages as younger children can find the simple sight words where as older children can find words they may not have heard or seen before and recreate those.
4. 2D Shapes
2D shapes include rectangles, squares, circles and triangles. These shapes have two faces only (the front and back) and are flat.
Using paddle pop sticks, children can create and label shapes they can see in their environment. They can simply, look out the window, around the kitchen or in books to find all different shapes. To help name shapes click here through to the mathsisfun website where they give you plenty of shapes to choose from.
Challenge children by asking them to label the vertices (corners), sides and faces. Children can even use another paddle pop stick to represent the lines of symmetry (where the shape can be cut to make equal portions).
5. Grouping
This is a perfect activity for younger children (5 - 8). Children can use all the paddle pop sticks and group them according to colour, size, shape or even amounts.
For children that need a little more help when counting, grouping this way can be perfect to help them visually see groups of numbers. For example, the blue pile has 7 and the red has 6. Children can add these two piles up by individually counting each paddle pop stick.
Grouping the paddle pop sticks like this can also help children talk about quantifies like larger and smaller. You can easily help them create a table to see which colour is the most or least popular. This website will help you if you need some refreshing of data skills.
With all the activities I suggest, I urge you to allow your child to simply play. It is okay to have a focus on the activities I have listed above. However, we need to give our children the freedom to play and problem solve for themselves. It is through play that children engage with and develop a relationship with the world around them. Using their hands, making mistakes and creating some mess is actually a healthy part of their learning development.
Always remember, you're doing an amazing job. Parenting isn't an easy gig. Let their curiosity and wonder shine through play. If you need any help or have any questions at all about the activities above, please send me an email and I will be more than happy to get back to you answering any questions you may have.
Megan :) x
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